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Fire explodes from Rick Moritz's black powder rifle as he shoots at a target at the Wenatchee Rifle and Revolver Club in Wenatchee on Tuesday.
Rick Moritz checks his sight before shooting.
Rick Moritz loads a .38-caliber round into his black powder rifle.
Rick Moritz's black powder gun barrel is lined with stickers showing the gun qualified for national competitions.
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Fire explodes from Rick Moritz's black powder rifle as he shoots at a target at the Wenatchee Rifle and Revolver Club in Wenatchee on Tuesday.
WENATCHEE — For the first 10 years of competition with rifles using one-shot, black powder cartridges, Rick Moritz didn’t do well.
He had a good rifle. He was casting lead bullets on his own. He was working hard to calibrate his Vernier tang sight for wind and distance. And he was practicing often.
But he still missing more targets than he was hitting.
Then, he found himself sitting in an airplane, chatting with a man who turned out to be Olympic shooting champion Lanny Bassham.
“I told him, ‘I’m stuck,’ ” Moritz says. “I’m just not improving, and he said to me, ‘Have you read my book?’ ”
Moritz went out the next day and bought “With Winning in Mind,” and learned a critical skill.
“You have to be confident about what you’re doing,” Moritz says. “When you’re in a match, you can focus on counting up the score in your head and comparing yourself to others, or you can look at performance.
“It’s kind of like a zen thing. You just stay in the moment.”
Rick Moritz checks his sight before shooting.
With that mindset, he moved through the stages of becoming a champion himself. The Master Class competitor took home first-place honors in July at the NRA National Championships in New Mexico. He won in the category of iron sights silhouette and in the category scope silhouette. The silhouettes are the black, metal targets that competitors shoot at in the 200-, 300-, 385-, and 500-meter range.
Since 2001, Moritz has won 12 national championships.
Moritz lives with his wife, Marisa, a retired physician and watercolor artist, in Lower Sunnyslope. They moved there in 2016.
He ekes out time for rifle practice while working part-time as a mining engineer for a company in Denver. He has found the math skills that he uses in his job critical to black powder rifle shooting. Those skills, he says, are critical to manipulating the Vernier tang sight on his rifle.
“I look at this and think, ‘What a neat little mechanical device,’ ” he says.
Rick Moritz loads a .38-caliber round into his black powder rifle.
In the Vernier tang sight, a vertical sliding scale adjusts for elevation. “You can make adjustments equal to one inch at 100 yards,” he says.
Another part of t he device is horizontal scale that adjusts for windage.
Moritz uses rifles that are reproductions of post Civil War weaponry. His rifles of choice are a Stevens 44 1/2, and a Sharps 1874.
Moritz says he became interested in shooting when he was a boy, aiming at cans with a Winchester pump 22. He admits to not being a good hunter but has always enjoyed target shooting.
In 1991, while living in Colorado, he heard about a black powder cartridge rifle competition that was a three-hour drive from his home. He and Marisa decided to check it out.
“As we walked up to the firing line, there were about 30 shooters on the line. It’s a timed event. They gave them the ready and fire. They all shot very close to the same time. It was so neat, like seeing cannons fire out of the side of an old sailing ship.”
He was also intrigued by the challenge of shooting these reproduction rifles.
“A modern rifle shoots at 3,000 feet per second,” he says. “These go at 1,200 feet per second, which is comparatively slow. It’s harder to shoot because the bullet drifts more.”
Rifles are reproductions from 1870 to 1896.
A single cartridge must be inserted before each individual shot.
Components of the cartridge are the brass case, a primer, the black powder and the lead bullet.
When the cartridge is fired, only half of the black powder is turned into gas with each shot. The other half is left as fouling in the barrel, requiring the shooter to wipe out the barrel after each shot.
Rifles are also called falling block rifles, which refers to the metal block that a shooter locks in place to hold the cartridge.
Match-grade lead bullets, which are in the front of the cartridge, are not commercially sold. Shooters usually cast their own bullets using custom molds.
Rifles shoot at a pressure of 14,000 pounds per square inch, compared with 50,000 ppsi for modern rifles.
Rifles fire at 1,200 feet per second, compared with 3,000 feet per second for modern rifles.
In some matches, shooters use Vernier tang sights (also called iron sights), which must be manually adjusted to account for elevation and wind. Pierre Vernier invented the scale that bears his name; the tang on a rifle is where a person grips the rifle with the shooting hand.
In other matches, shooters use a period-correct scope.
Competition shooting ranges are 200- 300- 385- and 500-meters. Rifles are considered fairly accurate up to 900 meters.
Articles, including ones by Rick Moritz, on black powder cartridge shooting can be found in The Black Powder Cartridge News.
— Dee Riggs, for The World
Competition is made more equal with the single-shot, falling block rifles, he says, because it’s not an equipment race.
“You can’t go out and buy a rifle that’s any better than any other person’s,” he says. “These are all of the same era, the same style and all of them have to use lead bullets; there are no copper jackets on them like modern bullets.”
Moritz says practicing yoga and lifting weights helps strengthen his muscles and his flexibility, which is critical to accurate shooting. He practices at the Wenatchee Rifle and Revolver Club up No. 2 Canyon Road. Usually, he’s alone at the range, but when other shooters are around, they are often interested in his rifles.
Moritz, 65, says his goal now is to stay as a master-class shooter for as long as he can. And he plans to keep his confidence high. He gets emotional when he talks about a two-day match in New Mexico in the pouring rain where visibility was, according to a writer who covered the match, “nigh to impossible.”
Moritz harkened back to the advice in Bassham’s book.
Rick Moritz's black powder gun barrel is lined with stickers showing the gun qualified for national competitions.
“It was just believing that I could do it,” he says. “Everybody else was just throwing their hands up and saying, ‘I can’t see the target.’ I told myself, ‘Well, I’ve never shot in the pouring rain before but I’m a real good rain shooter.’ ”
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